Asus P5W DH Deluxe, 975X Core 2 Duo Ready Motherboard

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Game Testing - Quake 4

For our first gaming test, we benchmarked all of the test systems using a custom single-player Quake 4 timedemo. Here, we installed the v1.2 patch which is SMP capable, cranked the resolution down to 640 x 480, and configured the game to run at its "Low-Quality" graphics setting. Although Quake 4 typically taxes today's high-end GPUs, when it's configured at these minimal settings it too is more CPU and memory-bound than anything else.

Benchmarks with Quake 4 v1.2: Low Quality

OpenGL Gaming Performance

More of the same impressive performance here; a healthy lead for the E6700 driven systems and the Asus P5W DH Deluxe motherboard over the A64 5000+, and a real horse race between the Asus and Intel 975X-based motherboards.

Then, to see how Asus' P5W DH Deluxe would fare in a typical high-end gaming scenario, we also tested it with Quake 4 at high-resolution settings that tax the graphics sub-system of each of our test machines. This time we changed our configuration to a Radeon X1900 CrossFire setup to show you what mult-GPU performance can be like on this motherboard.

Performance Comparisons with Quake 4

High Resolution OpenGL Gaming Tests

Quake 4

id Software, in conjunction with developer Raven, recently released the latest addition to the wildly popular Quake franchise, Quake 4. Quake 4 is based upon an updated and slightly modified version of the Doom 3 engine, and as such, performance characteristics between the two titles are very similar. Like Doom 3, Quake 4 is also an OpenGL game that uses extremely high-detailed textures and a ton of dynamic lighting and shadows, but unlike Doom3, Quake 4 features some outdoor environments as well. We ran these Quake 4 benchmarks using a custom demo with the game set to its "High-Quality" mode, at a resolution of 1600x1200 with 4X AA and 8X aniso enabled simultaneously.

Our Quake 4 CrossFire scores are approximately 81% faster than a single card configuration on the Asus P5W DH Deluxe from Asus. Someday we'd love to see NVIDIA open up their drivers and allow SLI setups on Intel chipset-based boards. Are we dreamers? Perhaps but then again we've learned not to be surprised by much in little industry of ours.